Category Archives: mild ramblings

One minute, one week, and you make the mistake of thinking it’s okay. That you’re okay. That it’s safe to be familiar and it’s safe to sit a breath away. That it’s safe to look at and it’s safe to smile. Out of a hundred, you estimate that the chance of you catching it is around five percent. Or less. Likely zero.

Here, have a non-committal snicker. Not you. Never you. It’s probably just a myth after all.

That’s when the symptoms start.

It begins with the little things. Trivial minute details that you (or anyone else for that matter) barely notice.

First you see. (No, not yourself. A little bit later on you will, when it’s too late.) You notice the cause of the sickness first. Wow. When did those smiles get so unique? When did you start wanting to see them so much? What’s that scent? Since when did it smell so good?

Since when did your gravity shift from the world in general to just one, previously insignificant being?

And then you start fussing about the little things, ‘I look ridiculous‘, ‘Does this hairdo suit me‘, ‘Do I look awful‘, ‘Did I say this right‘, ‘Do I sound desperate‘ ‘Am I being obvious’ ‘Shit, could they possibly know I…‘- you put an end to your average carefree life and constantly live through the exhausting thrill of thinking too much, assuming too much (oh my god, he looked this way; oh hell, she smiled at me today), with occasional dips of depression that out of the two of you, you realize you’re probably the only one who gives a flying fuck about what stupid shirt you wore today.

It’s an affliction that eats you from inside out.

Of course you deny it, like all infected do. Some lie, so well in fact that they end up believing it. And the sickness festers, rots, and gnashes, and throbs- until it hurts too much so they succumb to treatment or they try to kill it themselves. Others acknowledge it with defeat. With hope. With dread. Few take the flippant approach where the symptoms are pushed to the surface (because truth is so rarely spoken out loud these days- it’s a lie, it has to be, otherwise why would you say it and risk it?)

Then again however you may deal with this it’s final. You caught it (or rather it caught you- hook line and sinker) and you have no idea how to cure yourself. Comparable to addiction maybe but no, addiction gives you the first hit, the first choice- try it? No? Yes? – this one however- Hey, hi, nice to meet you. Yeah, what are you talking about, of course we’re best friends. Or, yes, I hate you. Despise your very existence. Or, I’m straight, I can’t possibly- that’s gross.

Wait.

Uh. I think I…

It’s hardly a matter of choice.

It creeps and creeps and when it finds one weak point, it tumbles all at once and breaches all precaution like there’s no tomorrow. You wake up and you find yourself sick and aching for a cure. A look maybe. One message? A laugh? A glance? For just a second?

Like every infection there were ways to avoid it. Of course like vegetables or exercise, the healthy way isn’t always the tastiest. The happiest. The liveliest. You just had to go and gorge yourself on delectable personality traits and feast on physical attributes that suddenly became your ideal. Now it’s too late.

This is the kind of infection that you either nurture with the right medicine where the cause is the cure. The medicine is costly, the stakes high. Painful. You may get the medicine or die trying. It can take months, weeks. Depends on the gravity of the cause or the level of infection. You can try your darnest and still suffer pain until you die.

When you die, good luck, you’re cured.

Or you cut it before it consumes you whole. An amputee- less of who you were, but hey, at least you’re alive.

It’s the fire I felt spreading across my face when I remembered I hadn’t worn the prescribed dress code for Fridays.

It’s the raging inferno that constricted my lungs when I saw you for the first time.

You, who wore that garish shade and made it seem as if the intensity was crafted just to compliment your alabaster skin.

It’s the subtle glow in your cheeks when you talk, completely oblivious to the fact that you have me enthralled with every flick of your hair. (For what seemed like an eternity, I am captivated. I can’t look away.)

When finally (regrettably), the class ends; I’m still swimming in that shade of your lips that held my attention throughout the whole day. (Even if I never really did get a chance to hear what they had to say.)

It’s the sudden jolt of panic in my chest when we accidentally exchange glances from across the room (don’t ever turn) -and I immediately look away.

(No, I didn’t mean it- I need to see your eyes again.)

It’s the heady mixture of giddiness and paranoia in my head when you change seats by chance -in front of me- (so fucking near, so fucking far away) on the last day of the semester.

It’s the streak of ink that marked my paper, when I finish the test earlier than intended and run away.

It’s the figurative flames I use to burn the few pointless memories I have of you in my head.

It’s the persistent flicker of embers that refuse to die each time I try.

It’s the vibrant hue of the little trinkets scattered all over campus on valentines when I regret not catching even a glimpse of your lean, wispy frame.

It’s the the color that would then annoy me for days.

It’s the frantic pulsing in my ears every time I see you walking at least five steps ahead.

It’s the silly shame that drowns me when I think that, between the two of us, I’m probably the only one who cares.

It’s the warmth of the sinking sun the last time I cross paths with you on my way home.

It’s the sensation I felt leaving me when I realize this might be the last day I’ll see your face.

Anyway, why am I writing this? Just to be clear, I’m not trying to suck up to you guys (by guys, I mean those two, if they happen to read this) ’cause I did something horrible that you have yet to find out or anything with ulterior motives in mind. You know me, completely affectionate and innocent creature that I am.

I’m doing this prompt where I talk about something ‘traditional’ or ‘ritualistic’, and I thought, hey, why not get my best friends involved because what kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t write a blog post and advertise their faces on a public website without their consent? (A kind one, that’s what. This is why we are friends if anyone is wondering.)

Look, we’re already pretty much a cult with what we do so I guess that counts as ritualistic, right?

I say yes, we qualify indeed.

.

Now, to describe our constant LVB Movie Marathons… where do I start?

LVB y’see is short of ‘LaVelBia’, which is short for ‘Lance, Vel, Bianca’ which is short for ‘yes, we so totally named our group like a bunch of animu high school cliche misfits on a manga fight us about it’.

We have movie marathons. It’s a sporadic event that we do when we have time, considering the fact that we are now in different colleges and for some weird cosmic reason we just couldn’t stand not seeing each other’s faces for long.

On a specific night- or morning, or afternoon (whichever time we’re all comfortable with) (okay, to be completely honest when we’ve finally gotten off our lazy bums and decided to function like human beings) we plan a movie marathon at Lancelot’s house. Dude’s got a huge TV, a nice source of food, and a convenient area we can crash on when we feel the pull of slumber. On some nights we get hungry or bored, we trek outside and go over this Ministop branch five or ten minutes away on foot. We buy nice stuff to snack on and talk about anything and everything along the way.

This tradition of ours- if something so impulsive can be called tradition- was actually first recognized as a ‘sleepover’. We’ve ceased to refer to it as such when we realized that, “guys, um, I don’t think we’ve been doing the sleeping part at all.”

Anyway, one blog post can’t really encompass all that happens during those nights. Or those days. Or mornings. (Ugh, christ, I need to stop getting technical.) This would be littered with annoying side notes and confusing parentheses if I had to explain every single detail.

But I had to write it. Something that means so much to me has to be written down in my confusing, drunken narrative.

It’s tradition because those haphazard movie marathons have somehow turned into a piece of something perfect, something familiar and nostalgic from way back, taken and preserved in a jar. Something that I can plunge into when reality seems too much. Something permanent that I’d like to stay that way. Life would totally suck without these dudes. *gags* I mean, awww. ❤

Okay. So what I’m actually trying to say here, I think, is this:

I love those four to five AMs spent with my best friends. I love the domestic ease when we cook our instant meals in the kitchen in the dead of the night. I love the subtle hum of a long-forgotten movie on the screen as we eat and comfortably mumble or excitedly gush out anything that comes to mind. I love how we crack up every single minute, how everything seems hilarious, whatever the hell we might say in our feverish midnight haze of adrenaline. I love how we pierce the silence with manic laughter at the simplest issues that we’ve twisted into the most bizarre scenarios. I love how we can be weird and comfortable and fucked-up and simply not care when we’re with each other. I love experiencing the proverbial comfortable silences instead of the common awkward ones I feel with other people.

I love the fact that no matter how far, how busy, how vastly different we are, we always seem to find our way towards each other.

We’re also planning a little bit of world domination on the side so we are kinda working on that.

I don’t like meeting new people, but it seems to have molded itself into my daily cycle.

Sheer agony.

Make no mistake, I don’t dislike the idea. I dislike the process itself. Everything about the getting-to-know-you stage makes me uncomfortable. It makes me jittery. I tend to make really intricate friendships with a lot of hidden context piled in over the years. Without that solid ground, I’m lost. I don’t know what to say. Will he get this joke if I say it? Will this topic sound off if I suddenly mention it in relation to their conversation? Will I sound stupid, or arrogant, or just plain out weird?

What are these ‘social norms’ you speak of? More importantly can I lather that in cheese?

It doesn’t help that now that I’m out of high school, I realize the media’s depiction of college isn’t that far off from reality- well, in my college at least. Though not that confined to stereotypes, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to work out just how the hell I’d start off conversations and keep them going. I’m in the worst stages of the getting-to-know-you-phase and even more awful still is the fact that most of them are already clustered in groups with their own stream of banter.

And- get this, plot twist- I don’t think I actually want to know new people that much. It’s just that I don’t like pity, and some think that my constant wanderings and solitary walks around campus is something that I didn’t choose for myself. So I’m occasionally strung along parties and lunch periods with people I barely know, making polite and dead conversation that drains all my energy and soaks me up in anxiety.

Meeting knew people has its ups and downs, I get that.
And I’m so frustrated hearing everyone say that you’re missing a lot by not ‘putting yourself out there’.
What exactly am I missing? I wouldn’t have met my best friends if I hadn’t gone through the getting-to-know-you stage, but they wouldn’t mean that much to me either if I didn’t dread said stage so much.

I guess this is all just going too fast for me and people already jumping ahead to conclusions about what I need, or who I need feels invasive.

I’m tired of meeting new people in this environment, but I seem to find myself going through the intro routine ever day.

I know this kind of quiet. Been living for quite a while up here, it’s hard not to memorize the patterns.

The silence was a welcome reprieve from the colorful chaos of the atmosphere- not that I didn’t like the almost constant buzz of activity. But sometimes quiet often make the land and the sky even more beautiful afterwards, splashing it with a thousand possible lives, universes- galaxies!- to dive into. Some new, some old favorites I’ve stayed in for years.

Oh, we don’t actually have lands and skies. It’s just a concept I’ve seen, one of those times when the atmosphere felt like being solid and stable, imitating another far away. I’ve also learned from another place that had flying circles and bizarre looking creatures said long dead- but living for eternity- of the term ‘atmosphere‘. It seemed like the perfect word to apply on everything that’s happening around me.

I have a lot of friends too. Some live in this planet with me. Some in the other places our atmosphere create. My friends from here think it’s foolish, considering these other creatures from an ‘illusion‘ (that’s debatable, I said) my friends. But we have a lot of fun, these other friends of mine. I have a hunch that they’re imitations of some other entities, only they’re better. Don’t ask me how, I just know.

Know, in exactly the same way I know the vague rules in my planet. Go to sleep when you need to. Stop exploring this other planet when it triggers the transition to some other planet we’d rather not see. Love, or rather ponder on the absence of it and what it really means. Learn, although this is highly subjective because sometimes the things I need to learn and things I want to are completely different things. Nothing concrete. They’re more or less guidelines that we flow through day by day. It’s like we’re sustaining the existence of some other universe, so that it can function with other universes and form their own galaxies.

From the other planets I’ve explored I do know this existence is far from normal. But we can imitate theirs for a while, so when has my planet ever been normal?

So when [person] comments, “I almost feel sort of pretty today,” when [person] gets new clothes, a new cut, or simply because of the daylight touching and illuminating [person]’s face in all the right angles-

I always hold back the urge to say, ‘You’ve always been pretty anyway. I can’t fathom there ever being a time when you might think otherwise.’

I can’t really explain it.

It’s not that I like [person] in a romantic sense, nor are we super bffs to require such. I just think there’s something inherently beautiful about [person] that doesn’t change. I don’t know if it’s [person]’s genes, [person]’s mannerisms, [person]’s character. Or maybe simply [person] as a whole.

[Person] is beautiful. But [person] genuinely seems not to know it yet.

It’s a little frustrating, because these thoughts are borne out of pure observation. I don’t intend to make [person] feel good or happy. I don’t intend to praise [person]. It just is , you see? I see it, someone claims otherwise, it puzzles and disturbs me. [Person] is more than a superficial object whose beauty can be quantified by mere physical attributes that change so easily. However much [person] restructures [person]’s self, [person] stays pretty. Stays beautiful. In the way [person] laughs, in the way [person] speaks, the words that [person] chooses to say… A lot of inconsequential somethings that probably amount to nothing and everything all at once.

If [person] might be reading this, then I hope you’d carry at least a little hope that you’re not just occasionally pretty. That aside from either the fanatic infatuation romantic relationships bring or the ostensible awe that a face gives, there are also people who have pretty much nothing to do with you, no reason whatsoever to like you- they just see that it isn’t your face that’s pretty today. It isn’t your current words that are worth praise today. It’s just… you.

Don’t even know why I’m writing this in the dead of the night with coffee being my only companion but… yeah. There you have it.